2008 Woodie Awards
Water speaker: we are hosed
Bob Scheid
Issue date: 2/13/07 Section: Campus News
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Borchardt has been working at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in Wisconsin for several years, after receiving his doctorate in microbiology from the University of Vermont. His recent research and the topic of his lecture was the pathology of waterborne microbiotics; he recently released a paper investigating correlations between illnesses in children and the groundwater supply around the Great Lakes.
Borchardt started by giving an accelerated history or water purification, ranging from Hippocrates in ancient Greece grading different purities of water to America's first water filtration plant, Fairmount. From there, he talked about chlorination and fluoridation of the water supply and how, within 50 years of both of their introductions, incidents of typhoid and dental disease were significantly reduced.
From there, Borchardt described the Floridan Aquifer, an underground river that holds a huge amount of water, on the order of quadrillions of gallons. While most water used and processed in America comes from surface water, Florida and his home state of Wisconsin rely primarily on groundwater for irrigation, industrial production and other uses. Both the Floridan Aquifer and the one near the Great Lakes are huge, but they are also what Borchardt called "fossil water;" like fossil fuels, they cannot be regenerated.
As the amount of water being used is increasing, these reservoirs are being depleted quickly. In addition, wastewater is being dumped into rivers and oceans, and sometimes is even pumped into the ground through "injection wells," where it can sometimes make its way back into the groundwater supply. This begins to explain the existence of hazardous chemicals in the water supply, from radionuclides and heavy metals to endocrine disruptors and enteric diseases; this last category are diseases that live in the human digestive tract, and can include rotavirus and Hepatitis A. Polio was also mentioned as a problem in the water supply.
Moreover, most of the 60,000 miles of water distribution pipe in the country is from before the Second World War; many eastern cities have pipes more than 200 years old. Borchard said that the system could take more than $250 billion in the next 30 years to completely refurbish.
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